Our View: Prison phone call charges: It's a racket

For those who believe people convicted of crimes should be stripped of all dignity, thrown into tent cities, given pink underwear and forced to pound rocks all day long, you could add "total loss of communication with family" to the list.

The reality of 2013 is that inmates are treated somewhat more humanely and even allowed the occasional phone call home, when they can afford it.

The caveat is when they can afford it. Louisiana's prisons have some of the highest per-minute rates in the nation for inmates making calls.

Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell, who led a fight to reduce the cost on families communicating with loved ones in prison, says he's frustrated because there's a move in the PSC to undo what he accomplished.

Also, two providers of phone service are ignoring the PSC order to eliminate fees and he had to push to get the PSC to file suit against them.

Campbell, of Bossier City, and former PSC member Jimmy Fields, of Baton Rouge, led the move to reduce prison phone call rates. Calls from Louisiana prisons cost an average of 30 cents a minute, about 15 times more than noncollect calls originating outside prison gates.

A PSC order in December, prior to Fields retiring from the commission, reduces those rates by 25 percent, but not until prisons renew contracts for phone service. The reduction is to apply to calls to an inmate's family, attorney, clergy and school.

Sheriffs, state corrections officials and prison phone providers opposed the move, but clergy from all faiths supported it.

The order also calls for the immediate elimination of additional fees - like charging $7 to set up a call fund and $5 to get any remainder left upon release from prison - but Campbell said that's being ignored by two providers, City-Telecoin and Securis.

The reality is most who wind up in a Louisiana prison are of limited means, as are their families. Our high incarceration rate is based on crimes borne of poverty: Drug sales, drug use, crimes to get more drugs, violence related to drug sales and drug use.

So yes, it's easy for the PSC to continue allowing companies to make money on the backs of the least empowered. But is it right?

Campbell is to be applauded for taking on this fight, and evidently there's significant money involved or else there wouldn't be a fight.

It's easy to say, "Lock them up and throw away the key. Put them in tent cities. Make them wear pink underwear."

But if we are going to allow inmates access to voice communications outside their prison walls, the fees for that need to be at fair market value. Free people have access to video and voice communications around the world for free.

It's up to the PSC to determine what the fair market value should be for inmate communications. But we might suggest 30 cents a minute, plus set-up fees, plus release-of-balance fees, is excessive.

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Our View: Prison phone call charges: It's a racket

For those who believe people convicted of crimes should be stripped of all dignity, thrown into tent cities, given pink underwear and forced to pound rocks all day long, you could add 'total loss of